Global Warming Fraud: The Big Picture

The recent revelations of scientific errors (not to say fraud) in the U.N.’s global warming documents are important, but Fred Singer reminds us not to lose sight of the most important point: the IPCC’s fundamental conclusions, relating to the allegedly unprecedented warming of the past half-century, are based on bad surface temperature data and are contradicted by more-reliable satellite data and by our knowledge of the earth’s climate history. We know for a fact, in short, that the computer models that are the only basis for the AGW theory are wrong:

The reports of the UN-IPCC have long provided the basis of the so-called ‘scientific consensus.’ Climate statements of assorted national academies of sciences, including the venerable Royal Society, turned out to be nothing more than rehash of the IPCC conclusions, rather than independent assessments. [Ed.: This is true of the EPA’s endangerment finding as well.] Similarly, the statements issued by various professional societies simply relied on the IPCC – without adding any analyses of their own.
In turn, this apparent consensus misled not only the media and the public but also the wider scientific community, which had remained largely unaware of the ongoing debate and of the work of the many reputable climate experts who disagreed with the IPCC. Thanks to the e-mails of ClimateGate (CG), we now know of the efforts by a small clique to suppress publication of such dissenting views by subverting the scientific peer-review process – often with the connivance of the editors of leading professional journals.
All this is now changing. The e-mails leaked from the University of East Anglia server strongly suggest that the basic temperature data had been manipulated, yielding the reported strong surface warming of the past 30 years. Again, we had long suspected this, because the data from weather satellites showed little warming trend of the atmosphere since 1979. Available proxy data seemed to confirm this result (see “Hot Talk Cold Science” [1997] — HTCS Fig 16). But according to theory – and every greenhouse climate model — tropospheric trends should be substantially greater than surface trends.
This disparity between the trends derived from weather station data and from satellite data was already apparent in 1996 (see HTCS Fig 9), and was amply confirmed in a special study of the US National Academy of Sciences [“Reconciling observations of global temperature change” 2000].
The NAS report could not reconcile the disparity and never explained its cause. But it has become evident now that the cause may be a greatly exaggerated surface trend – brought about by the CG cabal. We will learn the details once we unravel just how the data were manipulated.
The ‘manufacture’ of a ‘man-made’ warming trend, when there is none, likely involved (i) selection of stations that showed a trend, and (ii) inadequate correction for purely local warming influences such as the ‘urban heat island’ effect (see HTCS Figs 7 and 8; and the recent extensive publications of Joe D’Aleo and Anthony Watts).
In a sense then, the other ‘Gates’ discovered since CG – GlacierGate and all the rest – are a distraction from the main story. They were all found in IPCC Volume 2, which deals with climate impacts, i.e. with the consequences of global warming. They indicate a general sloppiness and make a mockery of the much touted IPCC standards and procedures. They have severely shaken the public’s and the media’s faith in the IPCC. But the main story is still CG – because it impacts directly on IPCC Volume 1, which deals with climate science and the causes of climate change rather than with climate impacts.
To sum up: CG demonstrates just how the IPCC [2007] arrived at its erroneous conclusion about anthropogenic global warming (AGW) in the latter half of the 20th century. They used bad data. It’s no surprise then that none of the evidence the IPCC put forth in support of AGW can stand up to scrutiny – as already shown in the reports of the NIPCC (“Nature, not human activity, rules the climate” and “Climate change reconsidered”) [2008 and 2009].

Now that we know Al Gore is a hoaxer, can we please get back to drilling for oil and gas? We have huge supplies of oil and gas under our control, but our oil companies–which by international standards are tiny in terms of the quantity of petroleum to which they have access–are legally prevented from developing it and, in some cases, even exploring for it. (Congress doesn’t want the American people to understand how much wealth and how many jobs we are forgoing by being the only country in the world that perversely refuses to develop its own energy resources.) Here, Chevron’s Vice President for Exploration, Bobby Ryan, explains the need to explore the Outer Continental Shelf, where unknown but no doubt vast reserves of energy are to be found.